And we gorge ourselves on San Francisco. We're suddenly a five minute bike ride from the beach, Baker Beach, rolling with dunes, the Pacific on the left and the Golden Gate on the right, and we're a few blocks from the Presidio, choked with pine and eucalyptus, recently decomissioned and all but abandoned. We bike through it, a ghost town of white stucco and wood set against lawns of parrot green, everything sprawled loosely, casually, on some of the most ridiculously valuable property in the world. There is no sense to the Presidio, its areas of raw forest, unkempt baseball diamonds near million-dollar homes, but of course there is no logic to San Francisco generally, a city built with putty and pipe cleaners, rubber cement and colored construction paper. It's the work of fairies, elves, happy children with new Crayons. Why not pink, purple, rainbow, gold? What color for a biker bar on 16th, near the highway? Plum. Plum. The light that is so strong and right that corners are clear, crisp, all glass is blinding -- stilts and buttresses and turrets -- the remains of various highways -- rainbow windsocks -- a sexual sort of lushness to the foliage. Only intermittently does it seem like an actual place of residence and commerce, with functional roads and sensible buildings. All other times it's just whimsy and faith.
from A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers |
